Tokenization, Agentic Trading, Harmonic: Robinhood's Mission to Expand Ownership with CEO Vlad Tenev

Sarah Guo: Prediction markets are an evolution of news. You just can see what's happening and what's likely to happen in the future through the odds. What is your reaction to the revolution in math that's happening with AI today?

Vlad Tenev: It's too centralized, right? It's like AI companies with their big data centers and their employees using secret models to sort of do all this work.

Sarah Guo: Do you think people will let agents trade for them?

Vlad Tenev: So agentic trading, clearly a product market fit. We're seeing really strong adoption. Like over 150,000 customers have opened agentic trading accounts with us. Many of these things that you describe, institutional traders have the ability to do this, but it's expensive and sophisticated. If that's democratized, what does that mean?

Sarah Guo: Hi, listeners. Welcome back to No Priors. Today, I'm here with Vlad Tenev, the founder and CEO of Robinhood. We talk about what Robinhood is today as a financial conglomerate trying to expand ownership in the economy, from tokenization to prediction markets to how AI agents will trade for everyone in retail. We also talk about Harmonic, his effort to make a math superintelligence, and whether there can be distributed discovery and science rather than centralized. Welcome, Vlad.

Vlad Tenev: Thank you for having me.

Sarah Guo: So everyone knows Robinhood, but it's also evolved a ton as a company. Can you just put it in context for our listeners? Like, what do you describe it today?

Vlad Tenev: We do a lot of things. We're live in some form or another in over 120 countries. And if I had to sum up Robinhood in one word or one idea, it would be ownership. I think we're the ownership company, the company that's most associated with that. So why does ownership matter? I think on an individual basis, people want to own things. It's the tried and true route to financial freedom, financial independence. If you're an asset owner and you accumulate assets over time, it's just the best way to build your wealth. So there's an individual element to it that, whether you're trading, whether you're accumulating assets, whether you're investing in venture, I think it's very, very important. And also, the things you own say a lot about your personality. It almost becomes like a part of your identity. Like if it's a car collection or your collectibles, your cards, your stock portfolio, I think there's a lot of individuality to it. So I think there's an individual benefit, but I think there's also a collective benefit in the sense that a society without broad ownership is inherently very unstable. It's a fragile society. And if you have more people that own things, they're more bought in, they have more stake in the outcome, and they become kind of defenders and protectors of the system. So I think especially now when people are kind of pushing back against society and it feels a little bit fraught with AI and all of this disruption, I think giving people the ability to own companies at earlier stages is increasingly important. And so it's really what ties together all of our things, from Trump accounts, which is ownership at age zero, Robinhood Ventures, ownership of private companies before they go public. Tokenization, you can think of as ownership gone global. Like, how can we make all the people outside the U.S., people in 120 plus countries that don't sometimes even have functional banking systems? How can we kind of plug them into this economic fabric of society? So, yeah, that's how I think about it. We started off as just a simple app to buy stocks at zero commissions on your phone. And then we've kind of expanded from that into an increasingly global financial conglomerate that allows customers to own things across a wide variety of surfaces and asset classes.

Sarah Guo: You might be the only large financial I think of as a missionary organization, with the other being like Vanguard or something like that. Can we talk about how you got here? Like, you know, I learned recently that you studied math under Terrence Tao and you worked on HFT. Neither of those sound like a missionary for people, if I may say that. How did you discover this mission or come to it?

Vlad Tenev: Yeah. So, I mean, rewinding back even further, I was born in Eastern Europe in the late 80s, kind of on the brink of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the lifting of the Iron Curtain. And actually, in the 1990s, I immigrated to the U.S. after my parents. My dad had an opportunity to come study at the University of Delaware for his master's and then was also able to take advantage of that and stay in America full time. And so my mom came about a year after and I came about six months after her, which was a pretty unique experience. I mean, you talk to a lot of parents. I didn't see my dad for a year and a half and my mom for six months when I was a small child. I lived with my grandparents and a large portion of that was we just didn't have the money to send the whole family. So we had to, we weren't sure that my dad would have a long-term future in this country. So we thought maybe he'd come back after a year or two years. And anyway, he did quite well and was able to send for my mom and then me. And my last year in Bulgaria, 1991, the inflation rate was something like 170% in Bulgaria. So my early memories were the rolling blackouts and my family huddled around the radio, which was battery operated, just listening to what was going on. The lines at the bodega, which I could see from my window for buying milk and eggs, the milk would come in these big plastic bags. And the one week a year you would get bananas from other communist countries. So Cuba would, the Cuban bananas, I remember, were just amazing. And then I would come to the US and there were just bananas everywhere, right? But they weren't as good. And so, yeah, and even after I moved in 1997, Bulgaria had the unfortunate distinction of having the number one inflation rate in the world. It was something like 2000 annualized. So they were just adding zeros to the currency every couple of months. And so from that point I just developed kind of an understanding of money. I had to be very independent. My parents, it was always a topic of conversation and we'd have to send money to my grandparents back home as they were dealing with this inflation crisis. And my grandparents actually would keep their assets in copper cookware. So there was this closet in my grandfather's house where, he worked as a doctor kind of in the shipbuilding and naval industries. So he was on a boat a lot of times. So he had his contacts at the port. And as soon as he would get salary, he would exchange it for copper cookware.

Sarah Guo: So it was kind of the first real world asset that I encountered people investing in. Like stocked, sorry, stacked like pans.

Vlad Tenev: Exactly. Yeah. In the closet you have.

Sarah Guo: Holds value.

Vlad Tenev: Yes. Pots and pans. Much better than the local currency at the time. And so, yeah, I just grew up with that. I grew up understanding what happens in a broken system where you don't have free markets and good, healthy capital markets. And I'd say for me, I pretty quickly discovered that academically I was quite strong and also independent, basically by choice. My parents couldn't really afford babysitters or after school activities or any of that stuff. They were both working multiple jobs. And my dad was a full time graduate student. So it was kind of like, when I was in kindergarten, five years old, they would, I would walk back from school by myself. They would tell me, OK, go to the neighbor's house. We lived in apartment buildings at the University of Maryland. Knock on the door, your neighbor will watch you for a couple of hours. And then they realized, all right, our son's going through this complicated ritual to get home. We might as well just give him the key. And pretty soon after that, I would let myself in, do my homework, go outside, play with my friends. So I was very independent. And there was always this pressure of having to succeed and do well in school, probably for a couple of reasons. One, I was good at it. And so everyone just around me was like, do more school, skip grades, like do better in math, more math. And the teachers would have these meetings with my parents like, hey, your son, do you know he's really good at math? You should put him in this thing. So I think that was one of the benefits of growing up around the University of Maryland, which is a very academically oriented community. And they would try to identify the kids that had potential and accelerate them. The other thing was my parents would just sit me down and say, look, the financial status of this family is very insecure. We're not making any money. So you're going to have to basically get a scholarship if you want to go to college. And to get a scholarship, you are going to have to do very, very well in school. And also, by the way, we might get, we're like visa holders here. So if we lose our jobs, we're going to have to get sent back to Bulgaria. So there was all this pressure to succeed academically. And for me, my math PhD program, at some point it became kind of this challenge. Like, what's the hardest thing? How can I do better at the hardest thing? And it was this almost like competition with myself and with my parents, who were also very academically strong. Like, oh, what was the hardest subject for you at school, dad? Oh, chemistry. Let me just do really well at chemistry.

Sarah Guo: Yes.

Vlad Tenev: What was the most advanced math that you did? And I think math has this like ladder of achievement. It's almost like playing a really good video game. Like you always know what the next hardest thing is. And it's almost like how quickly can you go to algebraic geometry or algebraic topology? And can you learn that earlier and kind of understand it? And I think what appealed to me when I got to grad school was this idea that if you create a new mathematical theory, maybe you'll be remembered for a really long time. And just like kids in school, everyone learns Gauss and Riemann and all these greats. If you create a theory, maybe kids will be learning and thinking about your work hundreds of years from now. So that was kind of what appealed to me.

Sarah Guo: Given that background, you should also explain what Harmonic is as an effort. What is your reaction to the revolution in math that's happening with AI today?

Vlad Tenev: I think on the one hand, it's very exciting and sort of predictable because the rise of AI models and the ability to verify the outputs put together has led to a kind of automation of the math pipeline. And I think it's really, really exciting. I think that the power and the tools, math is changing so quickly. Math as a field hasn't changed very rapidly at all in thousands of years. I mean, when I was in grad school, most of the work was still being done in person with like chalk and a chalkboard. There was no collaboration. People weren't even using computers. So now math has kind of converged with coding. Mathematicians are using the same tools. They're using version control. They're using Lean for verification. And the field is accelerating very rapidly. About a year ago, Harmonic, which is a startup that I co-founded a couple of years ago with the goal of building mathematical superintelligence. Last year, we created a model called Aristotle that was one of three that got a gold medal on the International Math Olympiad. And then subsequently to that, we rolled it out to the public and we had people using Aristotle to tackle unsolved math problems. And so it was used to solve these Erdos problems. There were other mathematicians that were using it for new results and so forth. And so then I started thinking a lot about, OK, what's the future of math? Like, how should these tools be used? And I think for me, it was very important for the tools that I build, not just Harmonic but also Robinhood, to be empowering to individuals, to people. And so the one thing I don't love about this latest wave of AI models solving math problems is that it's too centralized. It's like AI companies with their big data centers and their employees using secret models to sort of do all this work. And I think what's more attractive and what would ultimately win out in the end as a model is rolling these things out and actually putting them in the hands of people and having the users make interesting discoveries and inventions. So I am probably a pretty fundamental believer in decentralization as a philosophical premise.

Sarah Guo: I would love to believe that's true. I think that there are a lot of people who work at large centralized AI companies who would say, if I may push back a little bit, that this is cope and the centaur play will just be outclassed by more compute in an agent loop. Like, how do you believe that's true? Or what will be the human input here that is productive in math?

Vlad Tenev: Well, I think it's sort of like two separate things. One is what's the role of the individual mathematician? And the other is, is this going to be like a product that people use or are the AI labs going to be producing the products? I mean, I have thoughts on both of them, but on the second one, it's much more interesting. I think that a world where you have the AI labs on a proprietary basis, making all the discoveries and you have the OpenAI or Anthropic data centers that are just running code, managed by the employees of those companies. And they're vertically integrating and producing all the drugs and selling the drugs to people, making all the mathematical and physical discoveries and publishing all the papers. If all of that is happening and it's owned by the AI labs themselves, I think that's a bit of a dystopian outcome and unlikely to happen for a couple of reasons, not just technological and market, but I think also if that happens to a significant degree, people will lose their license to operate.

Sarah Guo: Yes.

Vlad Tenev: Yeah. I think you could have the same outcome of Navier-Stokes being proven or the partial Riemann hypothesis or any one of these things. And it will be much more accepted if it was like a random layperson using it.

Sarah Guo: It might be celebrated.

Vlad Tenev: Yeah, I think for sure. And I think that's how it's going to happen. That's the likely scenario one year from now. I think you also have the confounding factor of a lot of the people that are going into these AI labs are former researchers. And so they're excited by doing research. And I think they're confused as to why this is being poorly received from their perspective. It's like, oh, I'm a researcher. I was brought into a research organization to do research. And now all these academics are mad at me. But yeah, I think that, and I've said this to folks that work at the companies, I think it would have been much better if they found some mathematicians and kind of collaborated with them to not make it seem like there's this dark data center dystopian future where one company is going to make all of the scientific discoveries.

Sarah Guo: Can we talk a little bit about both the new ways you want to extend ownership as part of Robinhood and then also how Robinhood is intersecting with what's happening in AI? Maybe we can just start with what you guys are doing with tokenization or your vision for it.

Vlad Tenev: Yeah. So tokenization is really a new innovation. And the idea is almost similar to stablecoin. So the way a stablecoin works is you take some dollars or treasuries, put them in a wrapper, put them in a box, and then you mint and burn tokens against the box. And the traditional assets stay custodied at a traditional institution like a bank, and then the tokens can trade freely on DeFi. So they can move anywhere around the world. They can trade in fractional amounts. They can be swapped in different protocols or lending pools. And that opens up just a ton of possibilities. They have software characteristics.

Sarah Guo: Yeah.

Vlad Tenev: So you can kind of extend that concept to any real world asset. So we've done it with stocks. So you can put stocks in a box and mint and burn tokens against them and they can trade all over the Internet on blockchains like software. You can do it with private companies. Instead of a stock, it's like an SPV with private company shares that behaves the same with some slight differences around redeeming and things of that nature. You could do it with art, collectibles, real estate. So what we launched, we've been playing around with tokenization and experimenting with it for many years. So last year we had an event in the south of France where we launched stock tokens, which are tokenized versions of US stocks. And we did it in Europe, but it wasn't fully DeFi enabled. So if you're a European customer using Robinhood, you could trade them and they felt very much like real stocks, but you couldn't actually send them out on Ethereum or on the blockchain and put them in pools or compose them with other smart contracts. Now, this year, we took it one step further. We relaunched stock tokens with fully DeFi enabled characteristics. And we launched it in conjunction with Robinhood Chain, which is our new blockchain built for real world assets. And Robinhood Chain has become one of the fastest growing, I think the fastest growing across a lot of metrics, blockchains in history. And what we've seen is just an explosion of developer activity. I think we announced recently it's the number one chain in developer activity too. And developers have taken stock tokens, which have become kind of like Legos, and started building all sorts of interesting smart contracts, NFTs, pooled assets where you'll take, for example, a meme coin and link it with a stock token. And this is just sort of month one and month two type activity.

Sarah Guo: Yeah.

Vlad Tenev: I think these financial primitives as the foundation of a developer platform will become really, really big. And what's more exciting to me than this is Robinhood Chain is a way to enable the long tail of countries. So people in countries that don't have highly functioning capital markets or financial systems, like places in South America or Africa, anyone with a smartphone and a non-custodial wallet can now get exposure to US markets at incredibly low cost. So in the same way that I think stablecoin became the default way for people in these countries to get access to dollars, stock tokens and products like that will be the default way to get access to U.S. equities for all of these people.

Sarah Guo: May they have access to not just copper pots, but wealth creation.

Vlad Tenev: Exactly. And private companies. And really the vision for Robinhood chain and tokenization is let's just take all the things that work on Robinhood and put them on chain and make them available to people in all these countries. And I think one thing I've learned is a lot of people. So we're new to operating a blockchain. We're new to operating these on chain smart contract products. And a lot of the criticisms that Robinhood has received, like we've been called a corpo chain, right? Like the best blockchains are... So they told me that they said the best blockchains are managed by these organizations and consortiums and everything's decentralized. And you guys are a corporation managing a chain. How is that going to be as good? Well, maybe you sacrifice a little bit of organizational decentralization purity. But what you get is just focused leadership and someone, or some group of people with very, very clear direction pushing things forward. And the other thing is also I think it is good to have Robinhood backed products on the chain, too. A lot of chains take the approach of, let a thousand flowers bloom, let the developers just build all this stuff. And we love the developers as well. But I think having primitives like stock tokens that have our backing that people can trust, we've seen that that just creates more interest to build on them. Because to some degree, people know, OK, Robinhood's backing them. They're legit. That's a trusted brand. We know they're not going to go away. So that gives them much more confidence to build than if it was just a team of two or three engineers somewhere that are offering these primitives.

Sarah Guo: Is there an example of a composition that you think should exist on stock tokens or has already come from the ecosystem that you're excited about? I mean, one of the things that I'm thinking about is, yeah, it's like, how can we take some of these derivative products like options? Can you make like really nice smart contract native options contracts? There's been a tremendous amount of innovation in the traditional markets that's to some degree stymied by how hard it is to just move off of mainframes onto more modern things and take all the counterparties that rely on the system being predictable and slow moving.

Vlad Tenev: Um, so I, I think a big part of it is just, let's provide the primitives and let the developers kind of put them together in new ways. And I don't want to presuppose what developers come up with because I wouldn't have been able to tell you that stock linked, stock token linked NFTs or stock token meme pairs would become a thing. Like I just had no way to foresee how quickly those things would grow and become real.

Sarah Guo: It's not necessarily ownership. What is your perspective on prediction markets?

Vlad Tenev: Yeah, I mean, I actually think prediction markets do tie into ownership because a lot of people have unique knowledge and ideas and they have hot takes on things that maybe not everyone knows. Like you might be an expert in AI model development. We have lots of contracts that allow you to speculate and hedge on what AI model will be best this week or this month or this year. And the way to monetize that knowledge before prediction markets was highly indirect. Like maybe you could trade derivatives on Google stock or Nvidia stock.

Sarah Guo: And it's imprecise, yeah.

Vlad Tenev: Yeah. And so there is an important thing with being able to monetize your own knowledge and doing it more directly. It actually one of the reasons we announced and we're planning to launch KPI contracts. So for a long time if you wanted, let's say you're studying a company and you have a pretty good idea that it's going to beat earnings, EPS or revenue. Well, in the past, if you bought the stock or you bought an option on the stock, sometimes the company would beat earnings. The stock would go down for some unrelated reason, guidance or one of these things. So KPI contracts now allow you to actually trade the EPS print, the revenue print, or any of the other KPIs that might matter to a company. So I think there's that aspect where you can actually monetize your belief. You can hedge more precisely. For example, there's a "will the California billionaire tax pass" contract, which I think is a useful hedging instrument for some people. So not me personally. I'm not hedging with it, but one could. The other thing about it is I think it's a new source of information. I think of it almost as in the pure form, prediction markets are an evolution of news. So what does news look like in the future? I don't think it's the New York Times, but I think it could be something like it where you have your front page, your business section, lifestyle, culture, sports, and sports is a big part of it. And you just can see what's happening and what's likely to happen in the future through the odds. So a lot of people don't even trade these things. They just like to open the app and just check out what's going to happen.

Sarah Guo: Do you think people let agents trade for them? And when? And what's the impact of that?

Vlad Tenev: Yeah. So we launched a product earlier this year, which is basically a Robinhood MCP. We call it agentic trading and we have agentic credit card as well. So in the broader realm of agentic finance, I think there's two things that have product market fit. One is agentic trading very clearly, like having an agent execute your trades and do a strategy for you. And we're seeing really strong adoption, like over 150,000 customers have opened agentic trading accounts with us in the few months since we've launched it.

Sarah Guo: Wow.

Vlad Tenev: And if you look at the tool calls, the tool calls have just been following this smooth exponential where the last number we announced was something like 30 million tool calls per day. So agentic trading, clearly a product market fit. And we started by just having an MCP. And a couple of weeks ago at our Hood Summit event, we announced Robinhood Agents, which is basically taking it one step further. The harness and the entire UI is now inside a Robinhood account. So you can kind of think of it as if you're a Cloud Code or a Codex user, it's almost like a tool like that that's optimized for trading. So you can run loops and say, okay, every day, execute a run of my strategy, rebalance my portfolio, look at opportunities. We have skills. So you can do like a portfolio rebalance or all sorts of other things. We have agent apps. So we launched an app store where you can, for example, connect to a source of satellite data. And if you want to create a strategy that counts cars in parking lots of retailers or something of that nature, we'll make that available. And the way that I think that'll evolve is we're going to look at all the capabilities that the coding harnesses have and see how we can provide really nice, clean, trader-native versions of that that just make it really, really easy to be an active trader.

Sarah Guo: Amazing. What do you think the impact is of this on either participant mix or financial infrastructure? Just because many of these things that you describe, institutional traders have the ability to do this, but it's expensive and sophisticated, right? And so if that's democratized, what does that mean?

Vlad Tenev: Well, that's really the north star of the product. It's can we put the capabilities of a hedge fund or a sophisticated algorithmic trading firm into the pockets of normal individuals? So in the same way that if you were a sophisticated grad student in computer science or something, you could write a trading strategy. And if you went through even more effort, you could deploy it, you could get rack space in the data center connected to the exchanges. Can we just sort of streamline all aspects of that so that in the same way that it made it easier for anyone to be a software engineer, Robinhood agents and our MCP can make it easier for more people to be quant traders? And I think the outcome of that is there will just be more trading activity. I think at first it'll be concentrated in a relatively small group of sophisticated people, but their trading activity will likely increase quite substantially. And then over time, it'll just filter to more and more of the population.

Sarah Guo: Yeah, I think coding is a good analogy. It's like there's lots of people that want to, there's people that code and for them, they were first to adopt the coding agents and their output multiplied. But then now there's people that just wouldn't have picked up VS Code or Cursor before, but someone showed them how to use Claude or Codex and now they can build a website just really easily. So it'll lift the tide across the board. I believe the desire to make software or automate things is much broader than I did, perhaps before any of the coding and agentic coding and coding AI and agentic coding happened. But wanting to make money off of a belief feels like a much more universal thing.

Vlad Tenev: Yeah. And I think that as people, as it becomes easier, as you can really, a lot of people have ideas. Right. And if you can take that idea and turn it into a strategy with as little friction as possible, if we can get it to approach the friction of just buying a single stock, then I think a lot more people will do it.

Sarah Guo: There may not be an answer to this question, but is there an obvious way in which financial infrastructure or risk management needs to change in reaction to this?

Vlad Tenev: I don't think so. So I'll tell you the safeguards we have on day one. Right now you have to create a new separate account, which is segregated from your main Robinhood balance. So you can create an MCP account, an agentic account. You have to move money in there. And for customers that choose to have trade approvals, by default you have to approve your trades, but then you can turn it off so that you could... dangerously skip permissions.

Sarah Guo: Exactly, well actually it's not as dangerous as that because it can't go into your other accounts and move money for you.

Vlad Tenev: So it's sandboxed. It's sandboxed, maybe not quite air-gapped, but pretty close. And we built a lot of the infrastructure for the sandboxing and the harness in-house at Robinhood. So far, I don't think it's a huge percentage of the market. The reason I don't see any clear massive overhauls necessary is that high frequency trading has been a thing for a really long time. Markets went fully electronic about 20 years ago. Everything from the exchanges to a lot of the brokers have sort of conformed to this new reality of most of the workflows being algorithmic trading that happens in data centers in New Jersey, rather than what a lot of people still think happens, which is paper tickets and floor traders in a trading pit. So it's not clear to me that anything fundamental has to change with regulation. But as it gets bigger, which I don't doubt it will, we might run into special cases for which we need more regulatory clarity.

Sarah Guo: I was more from an infrastructure perspective. If you just use coding as a proxy, it was not obvious that CICD was going to completely fall over in the face of orders of magnitude growth in code generation.

Vlad Tenev: Oh, yeah.

Sarah Guo: And so that was my question. Yes, of course we've had HFT. But if everybody is a high frequency trader, that feels like new load.

Vlad Tenev: Yeah, I mean, there's a couple of different layers in the stack. We should expect our on-chain stack is slightly different, that already has MCPs. But you have our on-chain tools, a lot of which is Robinhood Chain being the best chain for real world assets. Also, it's the best chain for AI agents. So we're seeing a lot of agentic trading there. On our centralized offerings, we have a lot of end control over the entire system. We have our databases, our code that the strategies are running on, the sandboxes. We build a lot of those tools. We have to optimize all of that. But once it gets through our system, you get to places like the market makers, which are all extremely sophisticated software shops. I'm talking Citadel, Jane Street, Jump Trading. These are low latency, high frequency folks. So I'm not so worried about them scaling to meet the demand. And then you have the exchanges. Because of pressure from HFTs and algo trading, they have really optimized their APIs to handle huge volumes. But that said, I think we're still at a low percentage of total trading being agentic. So I think we'll have some warning. We'll see it increasing. And I don't think we're going to be at the point imminently where agentic mediated trades are a double digit percentage of the activity. I think we'll have some time.

Sarah Guo: Given you're such a strong believer in ownership and democratized ownership as important to societal stability and opportunity for people, I think there's a sense that the AI revolution is not a broadly owned thing. Do you have an idea of what the solutions here might be? And maybe you can talk about Trump accounts as well.

Vlad Tenev: Yeah. And I think we identified this problem last year. It's a couple of things. First, all of the major innovative AI companies are private. I mean, with some exceptions, you can look at NVIDIA and Google. But those companies were already quite big before they really got into this new phase of AI. So if you wanted to invest in a large language model a couple of years ago and you wanted exposure to OpenAI or Anthropic, you're basically out of luck as an individual investor. And I think there's a lot of reasons for that. One is private markets have gotten really easy for high growth, successful companies to raise money in the private markets. They basically have massive scale. And that didn't used to be the case. Back in the 80s, a company like Microsoft, even in the 90s with Amazon, they went public at valuations in the hundreds of millions. So individual investors that got in during the public offering could make a thousand X. Now, if you have an AI lab that goes public at a trillion or two trillion, in order for an individual investor at IPO to make that type of return, they have to get into the quadrillions. It's crazy. I think it's unlikely. It could happen, but I think it's going to be much tougher. And instead, the gains keep getting concentrated into a smaller and smaller group of venture capitalists or institutional investors. And then we're wondering, why are people upset about data centers? If I'm an individual, I don't benefit economically from any of this activity. In fact, you could say it's threatening my livelihood, my job, it's polluting my neighborhood, they're making all this noise. Juxtapose AI with something like crypto. Crypto has not been something where everyone trading it makes money. Right now Bitcoin is 85,000. If you bought at $120,000 a couple of months ago, you're down. 2022 and 2023 were rough for the crypto industry. A lot of people lost money in those years. But yet in 2024, they came out in full force and swung the election in a meaningful way. And if there's even a hint of regulatory overreach for crypto, you have this army of people blasting social media and messaging their congressman, fighting every inch of it. And I think a big part of it is crypto has distributed broad ownership by individuals from the beginning. Institutions are coming in late, whereas AI is the difference.

So what do we do about it? We launched two things. We believe that everyone should be able to invest in private companies. And I can convince companies to go public earlier too. Even though I try doing that sometimes, we are an underwriter, we're active in that pipeline. But individual investors should benefit from private companies and be a huge shareholder. That's really the vision behind Robinhood Ventures. How can we make it so that it's an anomaly to not have individual retail investors as a big constituent of your seed and Series A cap table? They should actually be at the earliest possible stage. Robinhood Ventures Fund One has an innovative structure for this. You can kind of think of it as a publicly traded venture capital firm. We used our IPO channel, which was the largest retail channel for IPOs, to raise capital in an IPO from Robinhood customers, individual retail. And then we use that to invest in startups. The funds are publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange, so they trade just like a stock. Robinhood Ventures Fund One was late stage privates, OpenAI is in that fund. You have a couple of other companies, fintechs, a lot of AI companies, 11 Labs, Cruzo, we recently announced. That was ultra late stage. And then we asked ourselves, can we actually go to the extreme and give people exposure to seed and Series A? That's where Robinhood Ventures Fund Two came from, to partner with YC and use a structure to give people exposure to the earliest possible stage where the risk is highest but the opportunity is also greatest. That's the fund that Rich Aberman is running for us.

And then we have tokenization of privates, which solves that problem in a different way. But right now for outside of the U.S., the North Star is can we get a private company to be real time tradable 24/7 in fractional quantities, just like a stock or a crypto? So you should be able to just trade Anthropic 24/7 in low dollar amounts with some degree of high quality ownership, at least as good as owning an LP interest in an SPV. And that should be available to everyone. That requires pushing on a bunch of things in the U.S., accredited investor rules being one of them. But we're highly motivated to lead that and make that happen.

Sarah Guo: That was my question for you. If you are, for example, a venture capitalist with a portfolio you think is going to make money in privates, then some people will have a choice of LPs. There's institutions. There's your friends you could make money for. Obviously, there are rules around QP and accreditation around taking retail interest. Your view is clearly that some of those rules need to be updated.

Vlad Tenev: Yeah. There was an initiative by the SEC announced last week to allow a separate path. They directed FINRA, the primary broker dealer regulator, to create an exam, an accreditation exam, where you can go as an individual and get accredited by taking a two hour exam at a testing facility, as opposed to it being asset based. Or you can be affiliated, you can have a Series 7, which is a licensure with a financial firm. So it's a knowledge-based exam. I think it's definitely a positive step. But the goal would be to make it lower friction, because how many people are going to go and sit for an exam at a testing facility? So more work needs to be done. And we're going to be at the forefront of continuing to push for that.

Sarah Guo: I think the main argument against such evolution of rules would be some sense of protection against fraud and paternalism there. How do you think about that?

Vlad Tenev: For our customers, we spend a lot of time talking to them, figuring out what they care about. One of the things they care about most is the statement that I should be in charge of my money and nobody should tell me how to spend or invest my money. When we say to our customers, do you agree with this? Overwhelming agreement. Not to say that they personally want to do every type of risky speculative investment, but they don't think it's the government's place or anyone's place to tell them what to do with their money broadly. Now, I think that people should be absolutely clear on what these products are. We should make sure to tell you what it is, give you as much information as possible. But I think about this. Am I going to tell you not to invest in the hot IPO? IPOs are risky for sure. Meme coins even. Meme coins have perfect regulatory clarity. If you want to buy a meme coin, you are free to do so. The SEC even wrote a letter saying these are not securities, they're collectibles. It's clear the way. So I think it's silly from a couple of different angles, not the least of which is meme coins are completely fine in any amount, but private companies are restricted. It's not rational from a pure risk orientation to restrict private companies.

Sarah Guo: Yeah, I think that's right. And people are smart. There should be some sensible regulation. I'm in favor of that. But I think we've just gone too far. The conditions that made the accredited investor rule necessary no longer hold. These rules are from a time before the Internet. You couldn't even get any information. And now there's just an influx of information about everything, particularly private companies and AI models that can just scour and synthesize it for you. So it makes a little bit less sense now. Can you talk about what Robinhood is doing to support Trump accounts?

Vlad Tenev: Yeah. This is our way of serving our country, which we're very proud of. Robinhood was selected as the sole initial trustee and broker for the Trump accounts. We're working with BNY, which is America's oldest and most storied bank, and with Treasury and IRS to make this program happen. The idea behind it is, can we get every child from birth to own a chunk of the US economy through the S&P 500, through a low cost diversified ETF? For every newborn child, everyone born in January 2025 onward for the next three years, they get $1,000 seeded by Treasury. Michael and Susan Dell, through their foundation, added another over $6 billion to children in lower income zip codes. A bunch of other people are following, like Gwynne Shotwell committed a donation of SpaceX shares. Brad Gerstner, who is the brains and the architect behind the program, pushed it forward and also made a really big donation to the citizens of Indiana and their children. We're powering the infrastructure, building the app. We love it because I think it's the best thing for actually getting household stock ownership from 65% to 95%. When it's successful, I think it'll lead to a much more stable and prosperous society in many decades. Our goal is to make this the best product the government ever launched and the most enduring positive aspect of President Trump's legacy. That's our goal.

Sarah Guo: It's an amazing effort. Sign your kids up. So a last question for you. Andrew Reid, who we both know well, described you as a strange combination of unlimited IQ and the steadiest possible hand when working with the vagaries of the financial markets and PR and large user bases.

Vlad Tenev: Yeah.

Sarah Guo: How do you keep your level-headedness or cool, and what advice do you have for the many business leaders that listen?

Vlad Tenev: I think going through a lot of challenges as a child just made me very used to going through challenges. I had a very supportive and amazing family, great parents. But we were kind of in this together. We all immigrated to the US at the same time. I wasn't a child that was given things. It was almost like you're a member of this family and we all have to figure this out. I had my part, they had their parts. Obviously I was their child, but I was treated with a lot of autonomy, almost as an equal from a very young age. We run through a lot of business challenges at Robinhood, at Harmonic, at all these things. But when you step back and say, does it compare to the threat of deportation? What about the 2000% inflation that we went through as children? Sometimes I think about that with my own kids. Do you create challenge for them? We try. I try to construct challenge, but you have to construct it. It's a little bit harder. They get a lot of positives. They could have tutors, they could go to all kinds of museums that I didn't have. They have safety. But I think there's something very important about having to struggle and endure. I try to create that environment as much as possible, but I think I haven't figured it out. So I think that's a big part of it. And also probably, as we were talking before, it's a good bit of nature versus nurture. Maybe I was just born like that. I don't know how much of it's the environment either. If we take it away for advice for other leaders, it is the optimistic take that whatever challenge you're going through will make you more level in the future. I think Bezos said this. The best approach to all of these challenges is just grow thick skin. You can control that about yourself, but you can't control the outside world. If you can actually do that, I think it seems to be a big superpower that not everyone is capable of.

Sarah Guo: Awesome. Thanks so much, Vlad. This is great.

Vlad Tenev: Thanks for having me.